The books we loved: Australian writers nominate their favourite reads of 2016

December 2, 2016 — 2.54am

Tim Winton

I live and work surrounded by native birds and I'm often startled by their intelligence and cunning. Now and again I'm convinced that they have personalities and emotions, and then I call myself to order and put this down to projection. Which is probably why Gisela Kaplan's Bird Minds (CSIRO Publishing) was such a revelation. Her study of cognition and behaviour suggests that Australian birds are not only smarter than I suspected; they may be more intelligent than I dared imagine.

Howard Cunnell's Fathers & Sons (Picador) isn't published until February, but I read it in proof and loved it – a memoir about learning to be a father when your only experience of fatherhood has been a litany of absences and abandonments. My book of the year, though, was Kim Mahood's Position Doubtful(Scribe). If anyone's written more beautifully and modestly about this country and its people I'm not aware of it. I think it's a treasure.

Tim Winton's most recent book, The Boy Behind the Curtain, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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Charlotte Wood

I am very excited about Josephine Wilson's Extinctions (UWA Publishing) for its cool intelligent wit and piercingly observant examination of ageing, time, interracial adoption, family, aesthetics and engineering. Just when you think you know what this book is, it gives you the slip and surprises you again. Classy, truthful, grown-up writing. I also admired Steven Amsterdam's The Easy Way Out (Hachette), a sharp, snappy novel about assisted dying. Blackly witty but never glib, it's humane and moving.

I've banged on all year about Georgia Blain's Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe). Whenever I need reminding of the preciousness of ordinary life I return to this stunning novel of forgiveness and family, which gives clear, beautiful voice to the fierce luck of being alive.

Charlotte Wood won the Stella prize for The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin).

Humane and moving: Steven Amsterdam's novel about euthanasia,

Adrian McKinty

My two favourite books of the year were the thematically linked Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance (HarperCollins) and Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber). Barry's novel is the story of an Irish emigrant from Sligo escaping the potato famine who gets mixed up in the chaotic Indian wars on the American frontier. Barry expertly splices the violence of mid-19th-century America with an engaging and sympathetic portrait of a transgendered family. Vance's memoir is an unflinching portrait of the decline of his family, his town and his people, the hillbilly Ulster Scots, who fled Ireland for a better life in America's Appalachia. How endemic unemployment, the closure of the coal mines and especially how an opiate epidemic destroyed entire communities is unpacked by an insider who managed to get out.

Adrian McKinty's Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly will be published by Serpent's Tail in February.

Sebastian Barry's Credit:The Irish Times

Graeme Simsion

I've become a go-to person for autism book endorsements. Best this year were Keith Stuart's A Boy Made of Blocks (Little, Brown), Jem Lester's Schtum (Orion), both written from the perspective of fathers, and, not yet out, The Original Ginny Moon by Ben Ludwig (Park Row), a finely observed page-turner narrated by an autistic teenage girl. John Elder Robison's Switched On (Scribe), is a fascinating, if technical, account of his experiences with experimental brain therapy for Asperger's. Meanwhile, I was writing about marriage and music. Zoe Morrison's Music and Freedom (Vintage) is a sometimes harrowing but always elegant read on both. For the beach, pack Toni Jordan's Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (Text) and Mike Bullen's Trust (Little, Brown).

Tim Low's Where Song Began (Viking) took a familiar subject and revealed it in a completely new light. Who would have guessed that falcons are more closely related to parrots and lyrebirds than they are to hawks? Or that Australia gave Europe its songlark? I had a similar experience reading Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (Black Inc.). That these familiar beings have social lives, live in close-knit communities, and care for their elderly relatives, was all new to me. On the human front Robin Dalton's Aunts Up the Cross, republished by Text in its classics series this year, is right up there with Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals as a quirky and hilarious childhood memoir. I haven't laughed so much in years.

Tim Flannery's most recent book is Atmosphere of Hope (Text).

Peter Wohlleben's Credit:Gordon Welters/The New York Times

Alex Miller

Robert Manne displays mesmerising clarity and a steady focus on the vast collection of sources he has consulted in The Mind of The Islamic State (Redback). Manne leads the reader unerringly through the bewildering labyrinth of conflicting allegiances and ideological shifts in the cult of Salafi jihadism that have led to the emergence of the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State. The incremental process by which such an ideology finds a place in the hearts and minds of young men is made terrifyingly clear. This is a brilliantly lucid study of what happened, not why it happened.

There is surely a breath of optimism to be found in that he seems to be of the opinion that Islamic State won't last very long, mainly because it has alienated the support of the rest of Islam and isolated itself. For a comparable parallel in the Christian West we have to go back to the horrors of the pre-Enlightenment religious wars between Catholic and Protestant that killed countless millions and devastated large areas of Europe between 1618 and 1648 (the so-called Thirty Years War). This book is essential reading.

Alex Miller's The Simplest Words is published by Allen & Unwin.

Drusilla Modjeska

Eimear McBride's The Lesser Bohemians (Text) is the standout novel of the year. When language itself, the very words we speak, and think, have become fractured and distorted, how does a woman write of first love, of sexual opening, of wounds and memories uncovered? Can language re-form itself, re-make the broken. It's been said that McBride comes trailing James Joyce behind her, but with this second novel she's leaving him in her wake. Triumphant and disturbing. In Agota Kristof's The Notebook Trilogy(Text) twin boys survive the war in an unnamed Eastern European country through an impersonal absence of morality they consider ethical. That in itself is a conundrum, but when one crosses the border and the inseparable become separated, what does survival amount to in a landscape of fictions and lies? Brilliant and disturbing.

Drusilla Modjeska's memoir, Second Half First, is published by Vintage.

Michael Robotham

Usually I avoid reading crime novels because it feels too much like a busman's holiday, but this year produced a few standouts for me. One came from an old favourite – James Lee Burke, a writer whose lyrical prose and sense of place makes me want to marvel and weep in frustration. Yes, he's that good. House of the Rising Sun (Hachette) is a prequel to his four previous Hackberry Holland novels. Set at the turn of the 20th century, this epic tale of love, betray and vengeance, sees a washed-up Texas ranger searching for his estranged son and stumbling upon a conspiracy of biblical proportions.

Honourable mentions go to Before it Breaks (Freemantle Press) by Dave Warner, which won this year's Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel; and to Adrian McKinty, now proudly Australian, whose most recent Sean Duffy novel, Rain Dogs (Serpent's Tail), set in Northern Ireland, is an outstanding example of how crime fiction can bring history to life and have us flashing through the pages.

Reading and writing are never quite divisible and this year has been almost exclusively French for me. Carnac (Bloodaxe), the tide-like incantation of the Bretagne littoral by Eugene Guillevic was a highlight, as was Alice Garner's cultural history of the fishing/tourist port of Arcachon, A Shifting Shore (Cornell). I relished Peter McPhee's brilliant new history of the French Revolution, Liberty or Death (Yale), and remained captivated by the only writer ever to refuse the Prix Goncourt, Julien Gracq. My heart goes out to American friends, all the more so after reading John Stilgoe's What is Landscape? (MIT Press). Stilgoe remains a heroic pioneer of the growing disconnect between nature and contemporary culture and his landscape literacy always comes with a twinkle in the eye.

Gregory Day's most recent book is Archipelago of Souls (Picador).

Robert Adamson

Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, out in February) is a powerful anthology, edited by Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave, and a thrilling read. It is selected from volumes published from 1990 to the present. There are 240 poets at their very best, a few missing but impressively inclusive. The editing is scrupulous, produced on creamy but light paper, so that at 660 pages it actually feels sleek in the hand — it deserves high praise, as do: The Blue Decodes (Grand Parade Poets) by Cassie Lewis – great poems are packed with indelible images drawn with a light touch, such compelling and accomplished works; Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry) by Anthony Lawrence (Pitt Street Poetry) – a many-sided jewel of a book, fine control gained by a precise technique, combined with an imaginative life at full tilt, so good to read. The Birdman's Wife (Affirm Press), a novel by Melissa Ashley, is compulsive reading, especially if you are interested in birds and the partnership of John and Elizabeth Gould. Elizabeth is bought back into the light.

In Everywhere I Look (Text) the light of Helen Garner's piercing observation shines on parents, friends, books, time, the weather, and herself. It's impossible not trust these engrossing dispatches in their passion and honesty. A lifetime of looking and taking note, and the hard work of examining the significance of what is seen and felt, make this a masterly collection of essays by our greatest non-fiction writer. Baba Schwartz's astonishing recall of her early life with her family in a small town in pre-war Hungary in The May Beetles (Black Inc.) makes its subsequent destruction when they are deported to Auschwitz all the more tragic. A beautiful, unsentimental memoir, one of the great stories behind post-war immigration to our shores. Amos Oz writes in Judas (Chatto & Windus) with unsparing honesty of his country and its ever-present dangers, and reveals the universal human loves and fears in Israeli society.

Joan London's most recent novel is The Golden Age (Vintage).

Piercing observation: Helen Garner's Credit:Max Mason-Hubers

Toni Jordan

This year, wonderful novels addressed gaping holes in my reading history. Louise Erdrich's LaRose (Little, Brown) is about two families rebuilding their lives after a terrible accident, but it's also joyful and hopeful. Ann Patchett's Commonwealth (Bloomsbury) follows stepchildren after their parents marry, over decades. And Georgia Blain's Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe) is a heartbreaking, beautiful novel of a family on one tragic day.

My favourite, though, was Ryan O'Neill's Their Brilliant Careers (Black Inc.). These mini-biographies of Australia's greatest forgotten writers — including Rand Washington, racist author of Nurse Sheilas in Love, and the "Chekhov of Coolabah" Addison Tiller — made me unreasonably happy. It's clever fun for everyone who's forgotten how to smile during 2016 and the perfect gift for the writer in your life.

Toni Jordan's most recent novel is Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (Text).

Ann Patchett's Credit:Melissa Ann Pinney

Fiona Wright

Three of my favourite books this year were by young and emerging writers. Josephine Rowe's A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP) is an achingly tender, brittle and poetic book about repatriation, PTSD and the effects of trauma on family and across generations. Similarly, Rajith Savanadasa's debut novel, Ruins (Hachette), impressed me with its nuanced and beautiful sense of place, and its exploration of the personal and political aftermath of the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. In poetry, I loved Alison Whittaker's Lemons in the Chicken Wire (Magabala) for its sheer guts, its wicked sense of humour and its uncanny ability to unsettle vernacular language and common speech.

Fiona Wright won the Kibble award for Small Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo).

Rajith Savandasa explores the aftermath of civil war in Sri Lanka in Credit:Pat Scala

Zoe Morrison

Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton(Viking) is a novel of great emotional depth and integrity. The silences in this masterful work become as significant as the words. In another spare novel by an experienced writer, Our Souls at Night (Knopf) by Kent Haruf, the love and joy of the two elderly protagonists living in a conservative American town turns out to be a radical act. Maxine Beneba Clarke's memoir, The Hate Race (Hachette), is an important addition to our thinking on race in Australia and has the potential to transform even the most well-meaning reader's perceptions. The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher (Pan Macmillan), first work by best-selling Korean poet Ahn Do-hyeon to be translated into English, is a fable about the meaning of life and death that gives some less conventional answers.

Zoe Morrison is the author of Music and Freedom (Vintage).

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Literary satire has really grabbed me this year: internationally speaking, I'd recommend Paul Beatty's Man-Booker prize-winning The Sellout (Oneworld), and here on home ground both Julie Koh's post-modern short-fiction collection, Portable Curiosities (UQP), and Randa Abdel-Fattah's hilarious but poignant young-adult fiction book, When Michael Met Mina(Pan), pack a punch. In non-fiction, Stan Grant's Talking to My Country(HarperCollins) is essential reading. If you're after poetry, Ellen van Neerven's Comfort Food (UQP) is a skilful debut. For the best in literary fiction, Black Inc has released an Australian edition of Angela Flournoy's hauntingly beautiful National Book Award-nominated The Turner House, and Steven Amsterdam's third book, The Easy Way Out (Hachette), is entertaining, expertly crafted and profound.

Maxine Beneba Clarke's most recent books are The Hate Race and The Patchwork Bike (both Hachette).

Essential reading: Stan Grant's

Jacinta Halloran

This year I've enjoyed and admired Josephine Rowe's A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP), a contained yet heartbreakingly poetic depiction of family trauma, and Carmel Bird's darkly funny and effortlessly graceful Family Skeleton (UWAP). Helen Garner's Everywhere I Look (Text), like everything in Garner's oeuvre, brims with clear-eyed insights and crystalline prose. No other writer distils quite like she does. I'm currently reading Kim Mahood's Position Doubtful (Scribe), an eloquent meditation on Mahood's long relationship with an indigenous community in the Tanami desert country. And I've also been smitten with two mid-2th-century novels: Mary McCarthy's wry Birds of America (Open Road) and The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (Penguin), Randolph Stow's exquisite portrait of a Western Australian childhood during World War II.

Jacinta Halloran's most recent novel, The Science of Appearances, is published by Scribe.

Kim Mahood's Credit:Andrew Meares

Paul Ham

With the completion of his five-novel autobiographical masterpiece, The Patrick Melrose Novels (Picador), Edward St Aubyn has skewered the English snobbocracy like no other writer since Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Waugh, St Aubyn is a member of that class and as a boy, he was repeatedly raped by his father. In less assured hands this might have turned into a self-pitying weepathon. In St Aubyn's, the result is a savage social comedy in which the reader is never allowed to forget that the writer shares the poison of inherited privilege.

The first volume of Volker Ullrich's biography of Hitler, Ascent, 1889-1939, (Knopf) is a workmanlike, highly absorbing biography. If it lacks the grandeur of Joachim Fest, and the narrative rigour of Ian Kershaw, it excels at providing contextual perspective and the slow revelation of fascinating detail.

Paul Ham is the author of Passchendaele (William Heinemann).

Kathryn Heyman

I came late to the Elizabeth Strout party, but what I lacked in punctuality, I made up for in enthusiasm. I devoured Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking) but it was her earlier Olive Kitteridge (Simon & Schuster) that won my heart this year. In Olive, Strout has created a character who inhabits her infuriating flaws thoroughly, yet demands love. A beautifully human and instructive novel, it made my heart a little bigger. My other standout was The Crime Writer (Hodder & Stoughton), Jill Dawson's audacious inhabitation of Patricia Highsmith. Weaving a startling evocation of Highsmith's fictional style with a fractured interior voice, Dawson simultaneously creates a thrilling, heart-thumping narrative while critiquing the imaginative obsession with violence. A literary trompe l'oeil, a novel-within-a-novel: I think it's a masterpiece.

Kathryn Heyman's sixth novel, Storm and Grace, will be published by Allen & Unwin in February.

Katherine Brabon won the Vogel Prize for The Memory Artist (Allen & Unwin).

Teju Cole's essay collection Credit:Wayne Taylor

Hannah Kent

One of the most memorable books I encountered this year was Heather Rose's The Museum of Modern Love (Allen & Unwin). The novel explores artist Marina Abramovic's performance of The Artist is Present at MOMA in 2010 and its effect on the lives of those who witness it. Rose writes beautifully, but it is her thoughtful depiction of the mysterious symbiosis of art and human connection that has stayed with me. I also adored Graeme Macrae Burnett's maddeningly brilliant His Bloody Project (Text), and found myself utterly absorbed in the 1869 case of Roderick Macrae, accused of murder in a Scottish highland community. Masquerading as true crime and comprising several "historical" documents, including Macrae's supposed memoir, His Bloody Project is a cunning and unreliable tale that still bloody nags at me.

Hannah Kent's second novel, The Good People, is published by Picador.

Clare Wright

This has been a traumatic year for Australian historians, with the passing of titans Inga Clendinnen, John Hirst, John Mulvaney and Patrick Wolfe. It is lucky, then, that this year brought us Tom Griffiths' stunning love letter to Australian history-writing, The Art of Time Travel (Black Inc.). The glorious anthology edited by Lee Kofman​ and Maria Katsonis, Rebellious Daughters (Ventura), demonstrates that it takes determination and skill to violate the "dutiful daughter" tag. In the fiction stakes, I enjoyed and admired Peggy Frew's second novel, Hope Farm (Scribe), and was grateful that I finally made it to Maxine Beneba Clarke's devastating short-story collection, Foreign Soil (Hachette). But the book that I keep pressing into friends' hands is Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley (Text) in which alternate chapters are narrated by a pregnant female dingo. Nothing short of genius.

Clare Wright is the author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Text).

Peggy Frew's Credit:Josh Robenstone

Malcolm Knox

Debate about how Hannah Kent's The Good People (Picador) compares with her Burial Rites only underscores the singularity of her talent. The Good People is a different kind of book, hallucinogenic in its evocation of rural Ireland and deeply humane in weighing different kinds of magic. Better than Burial Rites? Maybe ... who cares? Two novels, both knockouts. In a strong year for Australian fiction, the one that most surprised me was David Dyer's The Midnight Watch(Hamish Hamilton). Just when you thought nothing else could be salvaged from the wreck of the Titanic, Dyer has excavated a beautifully sad story about the terrible cost of one moment of pride. You will have no idea just how good The Midnight Watch is until you have read the last page.

Malcolm Knox's The Wonder Lover is published by Allen & Unwin.

is Hannah Kent's follow-up to

Lisa Gorton

There are times when Helen Garner is the only author I want to read. Restlessly honest, with a sharp eye for detail, her style is by some rare art at once crystalline and conversational. Everywhere I Look (Text) is a memorable essay collection. In Position Doubtful (Scribe) Kim Mahood describes returning to the place of her childhood, a cattle station in the Tanami Desert. Mahood's account of mapping that country with its traditional owners is sometimes lyrical, sometimes elegiac, sometimes grouchy, often funny and always alive to complexity. Ellen van Neerven's poetry collection, Comfort Food (UQP), is a great debut, her voice warm, down-to-earth and original. Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness (Verso) collects his short tales, dream interpretations and fables, and is intimate and full of magic.

Lisa Gorton shared the PM's fiction award for The Life of Houses (Giramondo).

Alec Patric

The only work of fiction published in 2016 to really delight me was Their Brilliant Careers (Black Inc.) by Ryan O'Neill. There's a rollicking audacity that kept me laughing but it also offers a rare perspective into Australian literature. Fiction from the past usually has more of a pull on me so this year I immersed myself in the oceanic genius of Herman Melville, not only the maddening glory of Moby-Dick (Penguin) but the glittering masterpieces that are Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartelby, the Scrivener (Penguin Classics). Katherine Anne Porter's literature stormed into my world in 2016 as well. Her book, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Elsevier) is so brilliant it transfigures a reader's soul. Between the World and Me (Text) by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Hatred of Poetry (Text) by Ben Lerner and The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin) by Italo Calvino were also wonderful discoveries this year.

Alec Patric won the Miles Franklin award for Black Rock White City (Transit Lounge).

Ryan O'Neill's Credit:Simone De Peak

Abigail Ulman

Reading So Sad Today (Scribe) by Melissa Broder feels like eavesdropping on someone's juicy therapy session, without having to give any advice. Incidentally, it also has my favourite Australian book cover of the year. The Easy Way Out (Hachette) by Steven Amsterdam is an important, thought-provoking read about assisted dying, and David Francis' Wedding Bush Road (Brio) details an expat's intense, unsettling visit home to the family farm. Post-US-election, I turned to The Fire this Time (Scribner), edited by Jesmyn Ward, for painful, crucial truths about race in America, and Marisa Silver's novel Little Nothing (Blue Rider Press) for an allegory about how marginalised people transform and survive. Both books helped.

Abigail Ulman is the author of Hot Little Hands (Hamish Hamilton).

is the latest work from Australian expat David Francis.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Helen Macdonald has written a gripping account of step-by-step training a goshawk, H is for Hawk (Vintage), marked by extraordinary local density, and by personal sadness. Her book brings to mind another new a more recent account of gritty English pastoral, James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District (Penguin). Among titles it would be hard to beat Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). The scope is enormous, the title naughty. This is a widely knowledgeable but rambling account, not of lads and lasses, but of our genetic inheritance. The merriest book I have read this year is Sarah Engledow's The Popular Pet Book (National Portrait Gallery), written to accompany the gallery's exhibition. The portraits reveal humans with fond animal company, and what picturesque pleasure the whole publication is. Engledow's own essays are full of perception, personal delight and the spirit of fun.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe won the Melbourne Prize for Literature last year.

James Button

My book of the year is 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber & Faber) Academic James Shapiro, the Sherlock Holmes of Shakespeare studies, takes apart the myth that we know the work but not the man by showing how apocalyptic events such as the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and the bloody round-up of plotters, some of whom were Shakespeare's cousins, illuminate not only King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth but the playwright's life. His landlady died of the plague; he often browsed in a favourite bookshop – who knew?

Graeme Macrae Burnet's novel, His Bloody Project (Text), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, paints a dark, unforgettable picture of the crofter's life in 19th-century Scotland. And while we're feeling cheerful, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (HarperCollins) is a vivid memoir drawn from the lives of the white working-class Kentuckians and Ohians who helped to put Trump into the White House.

James Button's Comeback is published by MUP.

Don Watson

Trying to understand the country that just elected Donald Trump I read with deepening despair Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal (Scribe), Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (Penguin), Jane Meyer's Dark Money (Scribe) and George Packer's The Unwinding (Faber & Faber), the last of which made me wish for a writer as good as Packer to do an Australian version that might tell us if the same pernicious forces are at work here. I also read Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War (Griffin), and found it no comfort to learn that the world has survived other power-crazed psychopaths in the nuclear age. Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East (Random House), is a great book and also no comfort. So I turned to Marilynne Robinson (The Givenness of Things, Virago) who, like most of the people running the United States and most of those who voted, believes in God. She says all the great Christians have been humble. What?! She'll never make President that way. If she were to I might start believing what she does. David Francis lives in the US, but his cracker of a novel, Wedding Bush Road (Brio), is about a family going up in flames in that mysterious little town in the mangroves of Westernport Bay, Tooradin Vic. It could lead a person to the conclusion that countries aren't corrupt, souls are.